Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/698

692 son's delicate white and yellow will be crushed out by a sage-green sleeve; and Mr Vicat Cole's most glowing landscape will strive to shine at you between the chinks of the arms of a fat man who has his back to it. This, we know, is how it will be. But there is a pleasant admixture in the company at Burlington House of another world which is not that of Rotten Row. There stand the representatives of Art, for the moment the hosts and hostesses of society; in pleasant confidence, their feet upon the floor that is their own, and all the patrons and patronesses in a certain subjection, which is a happy change once in a way. So many picturesque heads bearded at their will, and indifferent to the dictates of fashion, make an interest in the midst of the fine people; heads which are more or less familiar by introduction of 'Punch,' that great familiariser of the famous, even to the rustic spectator, and which almost all have a vigour and character which mark them out from the dilettanti. The art-ladies are not so fortunate, for dress tells more in the case of a woman than of a man. When they dress by inspiration of their husbands, the effect is apt to be less satisfactory than that which is produced by the picturesque looks, and now and then a velvet coat among the gentlemen; and when their inspiration is that of Posthlewaite (which still survives to some extent in these regions), the hanging sleeves and dressing-gown garments, amid all the rustle and nutter of fine company, is anything but edifying. It is, perhaps, sometimes a way of disguising the fact that otherwise one would be behind the fashion, which is better perhaps than home-made strainings after the fashion, but not otherwise to be commended. These, however, are exceptional phenomena; and the young ladies in sage green, half Japanese, half aesthetic, are very probably not connected with art at all except by fond aspirations. They form an incident in the otherwise somewhat featureless longueurs of the private view. The neglected pictures wait till the public come in which wishes to see them, but to the fine people a Japanese maiden is always entertaining. The swells point her out to their female companions – "don't you know?" – and for a moment Lady Jane is permitted to rest.

As we cannot tell you all we could wish about Burlington House, let us go and see some of the pictures which form a permanent exhibition in other places. The first and most important is that of Mr Holman Hunt, near the spot where the feet of the May visitor will go early, the ample doors of the Grosvenor Gallery. Holman Hunt has been, since the days when pre-Raphaelitism seemed a new revelation, a power apart among the painters of England. To say that he does not deserve this position would be rash indeed; but there are various qualities which tend to procure and keep such a place, which are not simple merit. He has exhibited, and indeed accomplished, very little numerically – which, though it is strange to say so, is always in the artist's favour. It does not seem to have been so considered in the high days of art, when Giotto and all his successors laboured incessantly, not elaborating one picture, but producing so many, that, had there been art critics in those days (as no doubt there were, though they did not write in newspapers), there would without doubt have been much talk of pot-boilers, and of the impossibility of any